The Paris Review Interviews

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume I we can imagine a New York penthouse where a jazz trio plays Gershwin out on the terrace; inside, Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote make catty remarks about Ernest Hemingway, while Billy Wilder and James M. Cain knock back highballs and reminisce about their days writing dialogue for Double Indemnity back in 1944. At the launch of volume II we might picture William Faulkner and Eudora Welty nursing Southern Comforts as they glare across the living room at Stephen King, each asking the other, “Who invited him?” Over in a corner, a tipsy Philip Larkin sneers at Peter Carey as “the descendant of convicts” while James Thurber cracks wise to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Alice Munro (the latter nearly choking on her glass of Pinot Grigio as she laughs at Thurber’s tales of the early New Yorker days). The Paris Review’s inaugural issue appeared in the spring of 1953 and included an interview with E.M. Forster that was the first in a long series of conversations on The Art of Fiction, a series that continues to the present day (conversations on the related arts of Poetry, Theatre, Non-Fiction and Screenwriting have also been published in the magazine). Taken together, these interviews constitute an amazing resource for everyone interested in “the DNA of literature,” and either of these two volumes (of a projected four) is bound to have something to fascinate any reader interested in the “how” of writing well.